Competition in Natural Language Meaning

Utterances compete with each other. Rational speakers choose an utterance that is true, informative, and relevant, and listeners reason about that choice. As a consequence, pragmatic listeners make inferences about other possible utterances (so-called alternatives). In the well-studied case of Scalar Implicature (henceforth SI), pragmatic enrichment yields the inference that more informative alternatives are false, or at least that the speaker doesn't believe them. A central question in the SI literature is what counts as an alternative of a given utterance, due to what is known as the symmetry problem: without constraints on alternatives, every potential alternative ? has a symmetric partner (roughly, not ?), whose existence preempts any SI about ?. Consequently, theories of formal alternatives have been proposed (Katzir, 2007). However, relatively few studies concern Non-Scalar Implicature (henceforth NSI) (Rett, 2015). This dissertation argues that the interpretation of adjectival constructions in Mandarin Chinese involves non-scalar competition, that a kind of symmetry problem arises even for NSIs, and that standard (e.g., Katzirian) theories of formal alternatives do not solve the problem. I propose to associate gradient costs with structural alternatives to break symmetry.